My fifth grade teacher was Miss Rotterman (not sure if I have the spelling correct or not – Kevin and/or Dawn (Baumann) Falkenthal – yes they got married can you let me know?) who would read to us during our lunch. She introduced us to sprouts, I still don’t really like them. Any way, at lunch we would gather our little carpet square (samples) around her and she read to us “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”. Being in the fifth grade I didn’t connect too much to what she was reading, I just knew I liked the historical story. During our first tour at the Rally, it hit me to what she was trying to get across to us.
We visited the Little Big Horn, Custer’s last stand. Very impactful in learning about General Custer, his men, the fight and the reasons behind it all. You see, the US government had “given” land around the Black Hills to the Native Americans that they could live on forever and not have any settlers invade their reservation. But about a decade later, gold was discovered in the Black Hills and guess what? The gold rush was on and the government could not contain the seekers, so they wanted to move the Native Americans to other grounds. The Black Hills are sacred ground to the tribes so they disobeyed the new deal with the US Government and did not vacate the Black Hills.
War. Chief Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Chief Joseph all played a role during this timeframe. General Custer and his men (around 250) ran into a Native American (multiple tribes now grouped together against a common enemy) encampment of about 7,000 people with about 1,000 warriors. Custer lost. Riveting and sad tale of our American History that you should reread or have your fifth grade teacher read it to you again.
In the 1990’s our government added and Native American markers as well as Indian monuments as seen above. The markers are where the soldiers fell. White markers indicate US Soldiers and red markers are Native Americans. Symbolic? Ironic? Dumb.
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